Broken Glass
by hist24jpcs
Summary: "And based on experience, he knows Bones has never been good with truly broken things." A look into Booth's headspace after Bones rejects him in 5x16.


**Found this on one of my flash drives, and figured I might as well post it. I wrote it at the end of season five, when Booth and Bones were all awash with heartbreak and angst, and the world was a dark place. So blast from the past! Basically just Booth's thoughts as he tries to deal with Bones' rejection of his declaration of love in 5x16.**

* * *

It's been four days of the most miserable, unbearable heartbreak. Four days since he tried to give her everything and ended up losing her. Sometimes he tries to blame her, but he knows her too well and loves her too much to really be able to. He knows she was afraid. And he knows that she wanted it too, and that turning him down probably hurt her almost as much as it hurt him. He could see it in her eyes.

So mostly he just blames himself. He shouldn't have wanted more. He should have waited longer. But it was something he wanted so badly, something he felt so deeply, and he couldn't hide it anymore. Maybe he should have eased her into it a little more, but, God, it's been five years. And he still wants her as much as he did during that first case, when he told her he thought it- thought they- were really going somewhere. And now he knows he truly can't have her. She told him no. Asking for a lifetime was asking for too much. But he wanted to give her a lifetime, too. Either way, it was all too much for her.

So now, he's in his apartment, his achingly empty apartment, sitting in the dark drinking whiskey. Drinking had become an activity he usually indulged in with her. Their traditional post-case drinks. It makes him even sadder to think that he has lost another piece of her, that now they can't even drink together. But seeing her, spending time alone with her, would hurt too much. It's both more and less painful this way.

He always thought their drinks together would eventually lead to something more, always remembers the way they once almost did. What used to mean closeness, heartfelt words, and possibility now just means hopelessness and heartbreak. But that painful transition, that increased sense of loss, doesn't stop him from drinking. He just chooses to drown in his sorrow, to get drunk alone. It's easier to mourn her, to mourn the life he imagined with her, when he's alone.

Some part of him is hoping that eventually if he drinks enough alcohol it will cloud his brain enough for him to forget her. But that is only one part of him. The other parts know he can't forget anything about her or what happened. He will never be able to forget her. That has become one of his truths, like God or the Pledge of Allegiance. The pain of losing her has become one of his truths too. Why does he have to lose her _and_ not forget her? It seems like a cruel combination of truth. Like loving his son and taking men's lives. Something good and something terrible bound together by certainty, by inescapability.

So he sits and he drinks. And he thinks about truth. She once told him that the truth was just a concept, an idea, sometimes a fact. You could know it or see it, but you couldn't have it. You couldn't truly possess it. But, God how he wishes he could. Because the curve of her smile, the color of her eyes, the bow of her lips, her compassion, her honesty—are all his truth. And he so desperately wants them, wants her. It has never hurt him so much to admit she is right. Because like her definition of truth, he knows her, truly knows her and he sees her, every aspect of her, but he can't have her.

He considers how she believes completely in the importance of truth, even when it hurts. The way she tries to discover and accept individual truths. The truths of others. So why, when he revealed his greatest truth to her, couldn't she accept his. She works constantly to expose the truth, to understand it. So why can't she see that she is his truth. Maybe she just doesn't want to. Maybe, for both of them, it's just a truth that hurts too much.

Before this, before her, he had always believed in the truth, valued and accepted it. But he just can't understand why the truth he loves best has to be the one that hurts most. Why she is the truth that both holds him together and tears him apart.

* * *

It's been a week. Seven horrible days and he still feels anguished and utterly damaged and completely lost. His heart is like a piece of glass that has been dropped. It's not just broken- it's in shards. And even though she's the reason it's shattered on the floor, he still doesn't want her to cut herself on the pieces.

He never wants to cause Bones pain. To hurt her. Too many people have already done that, and he swore he would never be one of them. He has willingly devoted himself to protecting her. He has wholeheartedly tried to keep her safe. Wholeheartedly. Maybe that's why his heart ended up in fragments on the floor.

Now he's even trying to protect her from his own heartbreak, his own pain. But he has to protect himself, too. And it's hard. It's so hard to try and heal himself _and_ keep her from getting hurt.

He's been tortured, shot, beaten—but nothing has ever hurt as badly as Bones telling him she can't be with him. That she can't love him. He wants to leave, to get a transfer, anything to escape the pain of loving her and knowing she can't love him back. But he's afraid that no matter how far he goes and how much time passes, he'll always carry that intense ache.

And he promised her they'd still be partners. He promised he'd never abandon her. Never be like her family. Deep down he thinks that, somehow, he's staying for himself, too. Even though it breaks his heart a little more everyday. Even though seeing her reminds him daily that all the things he wants most are the things he can't have, there's a part of him that still needs to be near her.

She has always been able to quietly, unknowingly help heal him. But he doubts that her eyes, her smile, her passion, and her understanding will be able to fix him when they were part of what broke him. He knows she didn't mean to break him, and that she never wanted to hurt him. But he tried to give her his heart, and she gave it back in pieces. So now, he has to figure out how to put himself back together without her help.

And based on experience, he knows Bones has never been good with truly broken things. He always tries to steer her around broken glass, and she always manages to walk carelessly through it. He doesn't see how this time will be any different. He knows she'll hurt him with every step. He just hopes she doesn't end up bleeding too.

* * *

It's been sixteen days since he gambled and lost everything. His mind is still torn; his emotions are still raging- like it was yesterday. He feels like a compass that got too close to a strong magnet. His thoughts and feelings are spinning, reeling, in all the most painful directions like the arrow in a broken, demagnetized compass. He tried to avoid it, to ignore it, but Bones has this magnetic pull that he just can't resist. He got too close, pushed too hard, so it is - in a way- his fault that he's falling apart like this. He knew what would probably happen.

And now he's sad and broken and hurt and angry, stuck between self-pity and self-loathing. But he had to tell her how he'd been feeling- how he loved her. He had to tell her the truth. They had always worked together to find what was true and right, and to him nothing seemed truer or more perfect than the two of them- than loving her. But now he was beginning to think that in this one crucial aspect, her truth and his truth would never intersect.

He tried to make her believe in love and forever, but she told him no, she told him that she couldn't. And for the first time he was losing his faith that she could. He tried to accept what she said. That she really couldn't change and she really couldn't love him. And he told her he had to move on. He willfully pointed his broken compass of a heart in another direction and tried to follow it.

But there's one thing he learned years ago, something Pops told him that he just keeps coming back to. He said, "The way the compass arrow is pointing may be north- but it's not always the direction you want to go in, and it's not always true north." True north is the constant, the pole that defines every other direction- the force that allows the compass to work at all.

Bones is his true north. She is the thing that gives meaning to his choices, but she is also the reason he is forced to look in other directions now- to follow another less true path (he is trying to be okay with this, he really is). She's also the direction his heart inherently points to. But he's learned that you can't just follow something because it's true. _He has to move on._

He tries to turn away from his feelings, to keep distance from her because he knows that the closer you get to true north the more the compass arrow will bend impossibly to try and reach it. In the same way, his thoughts, his feelings, his_ heart_ will be pulled painfully, unavoidably towards her if he gets too close again.

So he tries to ignore his true north. He tries to ignore the one direction his mind drifts and his heart strains toward. He tries to go south. Tries to forget that without north, south would never even exist.

* * *

It has been a month. And somehow things have become more bearable, shifting from the sharp, consuming pain of a fresh break to the dull, consistent ache of a mending bone. They are working a case together and he is moving on and everything is fine. This is his new truth.

But today he can't help but wonder how this truth looks to everyone else. Probably the way he wishes it was. Because he is handsome and she is pretty and they move and breathe in sync and it isn't hard to imagine what everyone else seems to see. She is wearing a ring, and it is full of meaning and promise but not for the future and not with him. And he's moving on. He is.

But the moment he saw her wearing her mother's ring for the first time, it was like his world reshaped for a moment and his old truths, his true north, fell back into place. They were together and there was a ring on her finger and it felt like a miracle, like a childhood wish, his coma dream come to life. In that moment, in that instance of sunlight glinting on her ring—there was love and happiness and a baby and a home, again. And then the mirage broke and he was back in a barren present where there was only tension and a taut thread of longing he just can't break.

And so for the first time since the whole disaster began-for the first time since he lost his faith to the heartbreak of losing her without really losing her- he goes to church. It's just a ring. He tries to remind himself-not for him, not for them together. He is moving on and he is fine. But in that illusory moment that felt like a godsend, when the future re-stitched itself for an instant, Booth remembered faith and peace. So he sits in the pews early and tries to regain those things.

And in the stained glass light he realizes that his new truth, the one built on dates with other women, whiskey, and separate lives—is all a lie. His most basic truth is that he will always love Bones. But he can't love her like a loadstar. He can't lover her like truth. He can't handle inescapable, unavoidable, concrete love that he wears like an open wound. Instead he is going to love her quietly, loosely. He is going to love her like a miracle, like hope—something he believes and trusts and longs for but never pins down. Always in the back of his mind, in his actions, even if it never tangibly exists, even if his prayers go unanswered.

As he sits there listening to the mass, Booth wonders if he can really have that kind of faith. But despite everything he's done and everything that has been done to him, he is still sitting in this church. He still has faith in himself and in God. He'll just have to do the same with Bones. And as the priest wraps up his sermon, for the second time that day, Booth feels his future slip back into place, just for a moment. He sees his 30 or 40 or 50 years, and for the first time in a month, it feels like hope.

For the rest of the week the father's words are his mantra, his corner stone, a new part of his truth. There is still distance and sorrow and pain, but there is no more doubt or loss. He will love her like a miracle, and he will have faith.

For the first time in a month, he brings Bones coffee. He still wants to give her everything, a lifetime, and he knows despite her fear and defenses that she still wants it too. He can see it in her eyes. And as they fall back into rhythm-as they talk and bicker and share food and investigate and drink to celebrate, the words from the sermon scroll through his head like tickertape.

"Trust in your heart in times of toil, and you shall have temperance."

So he will love her like a miracle, and he will have faith, and someday, someday he will have Temperance.

* * *

Well, that's all folks. Reviews are always welcome. :)


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